Serious Clubbing

At the moment I'm sitting in my office prepping for one of my weekly English clubs, and figured I'd write a quick post about the kinds of clubs I lead every week. First off, you should know that Peace Corps loves clubs. I mean, LOVES clubs. Peace Corps is pretty convinced that community clubs make the world a better place, and in many ways this is true. Clubs that volunteers lead provide a safe space for youth to hang out, interact with their peers, and get a decently structured hour of after-school programming. Clubs are also an easy way to get a foot into the community door and to show your place of employment that even though you don't know the language very well, you're getting things done and working with youth. Hence, we do a lot of clubs around these parts. 

Quite honestly, I don't really like clubs all that much. I'm not quite as beholden to their magical powers as my Peace Corps superiors, but my organization wants me to run clubs, so I run clubs. 

On Mondays, I run a 90-minute English club for beginners at my organizations office. It's called "English Stars". My director thought it was really important that it have a name, so I let her choose. I have about 6 regular participants (which is a small group, but a good size considering we only have 6 chairs in our office), all girls between the ages of 16 and 20. They're a good group, but they really don't know any English and seem to be hoping that I can teach them to speak fluently overnight. They're not terribly patient, and not terribly willing to put in any extra study time. I bribe them with chocolate and the translations of their favorite song lyrics (usually Rihanna, Beyonce, or Britney Spears) to keep them motivated and engaged. For the month of February, we're doing a unit on biographical information; appearance, character traits, birthdays, family, work, hobbies, these sorts of topics. Most of our clubs start about like this:

Me: Today we'll be talking about character traits and personality. 

The English Stars: In Russian? 

Me: Is this Russian club? 

The English Stars: No, it's English club. 

Me: So probably English, don't you think? 

The English Stars: But it's easier in Russian. 

They generally mean well, and they're good kids, they're just still figuring this whole language learning business out. 

Other than my organizations clubs, I also help out with other clubs that the volunteers here run as a group. We take turns leading to keep things interesting. On Tuesday we run an advanced English club at the American Corner of a local library. ( American Corners are amazing and wonderful things financed by the US Embassy. The American Corner in Shymkent has a conference table and chairs, a computer and internet, and a small English language library. It's a great space for English clubs, and the local staff are pretty great.) At this club we cover all sorts of topics from holidays to cooking to music. This month my pal Phillip is running a series of clubs celebrating Black History Month. 

Wednesday is Women's Club day. I help lead this club with 2 other volunteers. It's more of a discussion group than a club, and is conducted entirely in English. It's a safe space for women to come and discuss topics that they often can't openly discuss at home or at school (sexual health, gender politics, all kinds of things). It's pretty sweet. This is one place that I can really feel the difference I'm making here. We bring topics to Women's Club that locals have never even considered, you can see their minds opening up and their perspectives changing. It's pretty sweet. 

After Women's Club we run a movie night at an old Soviet move theater. We show movies in English with English subtitles, and provide important vocabulary and questions about the  film plot and characters. It's a nice, chill end to the day. 

Thursday one of my sitemate's runs a beginner's English club at the American Corner. When she's out of town, I take over for her. 

Friday I run a volunteer club at my organization. We have about 10 serious local youth that come for the meetings. Right now I'm starting from the very beginning with them, discussing volunteerism, service, and community. There's no concept of volunteerism in Kazakhstan, so you have to start small. It's a challenge convincing my co-workers that we can't just leap right in with this group and give them huge assignments, because if we do that we'll lose them. We need to figure out what they're passionate about, what change they want to see in their community before we go any further. This is my most challenging club because it's run entirely in Russian, and my Russian really isn't good enough to discuss any of these sorts of things. But I try. I try really hard, and some days it seems like my volunteers are getting into the volunteer spirit. 

After volunteer club I jet across town to a cafe where a local friend holds a conversational English club. It runs for 90 minutes and usually draws about 30-35 locals of all ages. We volunteers come to provide native speaker support, and to lead conversations. The only topics off limits are politics and religion. Other than that, any topic is fair game. 

Well, dear reader, that's my weekly club schedule. As you can see, we're serious about our community clubbing here in Peace Corps. 

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This is a quick one folks, I promise. There have been a few interesting developments at work this last week, most amusing: our NGO office is now the home of Altau Car Insurance! Our cell phone-repairing office neighbor has recently come under the employment of said car insurance agency as a programmer, and came by to install the sales program onto our office computers and train my co-workers in salesmanship. Now about half of our accountant's day is spent with car insurance clients, we have boxes full of official Altau gear (mostly poorly functioning flashlights and some broken pens), and we have people coming in and out of the office far more interested in insurance than anything my organization does. 

When I asked about this whole car insurance business a couple weeks ago, my co-workers explained that by law every driver in Kazakhstan must have insurance, but it's cheaper to buy fake insurance than to actually get insured. When we opened up shop in the insurance business, I asked my co-workers if we were selling legitimate car insurance, they looked at each other and giggled. So we may or may not be selling fraudulent car insurance out of our NGO office. 

The Nationality Question in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Yes, the title of this blog post could be a International Studies/Russian Studies course at a liberal arts college, no I'm not trying to be cheeky. 

The question of nationality is an important one in Post-Soviet places, dear reader, including in Kazakhstan. I'm sure there have been a good number of academic articles written on the topic, which probably conclude that after 70 years of having a "Soviet" identity assigned to them by the state, people are taking their own identities back. I could see that. What's more interesting to me is how important ethnic identity is here.

When I first moved in with my host family, my host mom asked me my nationality. I was a bit confused. They had a volunteer live with them last year, so I assumed they new the Peace Corps is a program for Americans. I told her I was American, and she said, "But no one in America is "cleanly" American. There are all kinds of other nationalities mixed in." I said this was true, but that doesn't mean I'm not American. She said that there are no real Americans. I've been thinking a lot about this conversation, as I've met more and more people here. They always have the same first question "Who are you by nationality?"

Here's about how any taxi ride starts for me.

Driver: Where to? 

Me: The 11th microregion, 300 tenge

Driver: 400 tenge, gas is expensive

Me: 300 is a normal price

(He, because cab drivers here are always male, gripes for awhile, and then usually gives in to my price.)

Driver: You're a foreigner? 

Me: ... Yep

Driver: Are you English? 

Me: Nope. 

Driver: What's your nationality?

Me: I'm an American.

Driver: No, I mean your nationality.

Me: American.

Driver: No. Where is your family from? What are your roots? 

Me: American.

Driver: You must not understand Russian.

I'm not try to be cheeky with locals when I say that I'm American. And I'm not trying to be the uberPatriot. It just seems more true to say that I'm American, than to say "Well my mother's family came over from Easter Europe, specifically Slovenia and Slovakia about 100 years ago, and my father's family includes a smattering of German, English, and probably a few more nationality's I'm forgetting long before then. So that's what my nationality is."

It's interesting to come from the US, a place where civic nationality is often just as important as (or more important than) ethnic nationality, to a place where the opposite is true. If I was a newcomer to the US, or if my family had come over more recently, I might agree that the "American" nationality doesn't  properly fir the bill for me. But given the circumstances, I identify as American before any historical roots. No one in Kazakhstan would ever identify themselves as "Kazakhstani". Not in a billion years. Here when someone asks your nationality, they mean ethnic nationality. It doesn't matter that your family has lived here for 100 years, you still identify with the ethnic group your family came from. 

Kazakhstanis are very proud of their nationality, and the national make-up of their country. One of the first things I often hear from locals is that there are 140 nationalities here, and everyone lives together peacefully. Though I hear plenty of racial slurs against minority groups here, the living peacefully together bit is true. I work in an office with 1 Russian, 2 Koreans, and one American. Our office neighbors are a Kazakh and an Uzbek that fix cell phones. Down the hall there is a Tatar businessmen and his Russian business partner. Regardless of all the peacefulness, nationality is still important, and often the first thing people notice. I guess that's mostly what I wanted to mention. 

Alma Mater Shout-Out!

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to my beloved alma mater Macalester College for making the Peace Corps Top Colleges 2011 list!! Macalester currently has 22 undergraduate alumni Volunteers, including yours truly, and ranks #6 among small colleges and universities for producing Peace Corps Volunteers in 2010. Way to go Mac! 

You can see the complete list of schools here.